Assessing the effectiveness of 4IR strategy on South African township economy: Smart Township perspective

Abstract

As the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic changed how people and business interact, its impact severely impacted the global economy. The government imposed heavy lockdown regulations further damaged an already struggling informal sector economy as many livelihoods and informal businesses within the townships came to a halt. Though the South African government introduced various financial relief through the R500 billion support grant, there are township entrepreneurs who could not access the government grant to sustain their everyday business operations. Despite the invisibility of the informal sector, it is considered to contribute about 5 – 30% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Hence, the need to develop a smart township strategy for the township economy will better prepare the township entrepreneurs with a creative and innovative way to survive any future pandemics. This chapter aims to identify factors and enablers that can catalyse critical and innovative thinking to safeguard the township economy and assess the maturity level of the national fourth industrial revolution (4IR) strategy towards building on a South African smart township economy. A digital infrastructure value chain model for building the smart township is proposed. The model also identified digital skills training and upskilling township entrepreneurs to reposition and align themselves within the smart township ecosystems. Furthermore, the chapter proposed key recommendations on how the policy makers could leverage on the 4IR strategy in enabling the township entrepreneurs to actively participate in the digital economy. The objective and significance of this chapter is to assist the policy makers (at provincial and local government level) in understanding both theoretically and practically technological innovation strategies and methods to adopt post-pandemic.